In the first novel of the sequence, The Gaudy, Pattullo returns to his Oxford College, after a long absence (and a successful career as a playwright, including extended residence abroad), and encounters a number of old friends, including Albert Talbert, his former tutor in English Literature; Lord Marchpayne, formerly Tony Mumford (an undergraduate contemporary who lived in the set of rooms opposite his); fellow Scot and schoolmate Ranald McKechnie, now Regius Professor of Greek at the college (McKechnie's wife, Janet, is Duncan's first love); Cyril Bedworth (now the college's Senior Tutor but formerly an undergraduate friend who lived at the top of Pattullo's staircase); and Robert Damien (College doctor, but also a contemporary of Pattullo's who embarrassed him by replacing the sketch for a famous painting that he owned with a bawdy picture of Mumford's at exactly the point when the great and the good had assembled to view it).
In A Memorial Service Pattullo is instrumental in resolving the crisis caused by the academic insufficiency and aggressively anti-institutional behaviour of Ivo Mumford, his friend Tony's son, and begins a tentative involvement with his cousin Fiona Petrie, a don at one of the women's Colleges, as well as rekindling a friendship with Janet McKechnie.
Full Term takes up Pattullo's emotional conflicts but focuses on the scandalous, and apparently treasonous, behaviour of the College's Physics tutor, William Watershute, which are dramatically resolved at the end.
Tony Mumford's title "Marchpayne" is obviously both a nod to the Marquess of Marchmain, a character in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (another novel partly set in Christ Church, Oxford), but also a joke on "marchpane", an old name for marzipan.
Stewart's sequence of novels is much appreciated for his learned allusiveness and the sheer polish of his narrative style, for his command of irony, and for his remarkable gift for accompanying dialogue with an acute psychological commentary on the contextual motivation for what is said.
In this respect Stewart is much more insightful than C. P. Snow, some of whose "Strangers and Brothers" novels from a previous era focus on similar bodies of people, and he is no less successful in plot-construction than his Cambridge counterpart.